Sections

U.S. inches towards Canadian values, but big gaps remain

U.S. Army Specialist Four Santiago J. Erevia, a Vietnam War veteran, prepares to hang the American flag from his home earlier this week in San Antonio, Texas. Americans have a strong sense of patriotism and conformism, but unlike Canadians they tend not to view their country as one community pulling together, Environics researcher Michael Adams suggests.Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Younger Americans are inching closer to their Canadian counterparts in their values, but on the whole Canadians are more idealistic, autonomous and self-confident as individuals than Americans, a prominent Canadian pollster says.

Michael Adams, president of the Environics Institute, said Friday in a speech at the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute that while Canadians remain firmly on the progressive, liberal track, Americans appear at a crossroads in their history, unable to figure out where the national ethos is headed.

Adams said his research into what makes Americans and Canadians tick continues to show stark differences between the two countries, with Canadians having more of a sense of community coupled with a greater sense of individual freedom than Americans.

“Canadians seem to have a nice balance between a freedom to do what you want to do, a freedom from fear of poverty or violence and the freedom to be me,” he said in an interview. “With Canadians the multicultural diversity, sexual orientation diversity, the abled and disabled, we have a very inclusive attitude that everybody is in the family and we’ve got to help everybody.”

While Americans have a strong sense of patriotism and conformism, unlike Canadians they tend not to view their country as one community pulling together.

“Not that we’re that close to each other, what with the differences in provinces, Quebec, the Atlantic and so on, but that we are close enough to have the common programs that we all embrace,” Adams said.

Americans on the other hand have a powerful religious belief that success comes to the virtuous and failure to the undeserving. Ironically, the strong religious affiliation of most Americans is peppered with an equally strong dose of Darwinian survival ethos. It’s the American view of a just world in which the rich are worthy and the poor are not.

“If you don’t deserve it then you really don’t deserve my tax dollars and you don’t deserve my charitable dollars,” he said. “So you are on your own.”

(A newly released Pew Institute study asked the question: Is belief in God essential to morality? Fifty-three per cent of Americans said yes, compared with 31 per cent of Canadians.)

Unlike in Canada, values of authority, patriotism, work ethic, ownership, religion and patriarchy dominate the U.S. landscape. Yet the degree to which they drive Americans’ thinking separate Republicans and Democrats into two distinct camps, Adams research indicates. Republicans attract conformists and authoritarians; Democrats attract idealists.

Canadian political parties, however, generally have to fish in the same value pond. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that only 29 per cent of Canadian Conservative voters said they would vote for Mitt Romney in 2012, while 58 per cent said they would vote for U.S. President Barack Obama. In other words, there might not be any difference between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Obama.

While Canadians since 1992 have remained firmly in the idealist, self-reliant and open-minded camp, the U.S. trajectory has wandered from a strong sense of duty and work ethic to risk-taking and attention-craving before settling smack in the middle with little idea of where it is headed in the 2016 elections.

Adams is author of the groundbreaking book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. He has been tracking 60 “value dimensions” — such as acceptance of violence, duty and religion, sex and xenophobia – for several decades. He was in Washington to deliver his latest findings, as of 2012.

He contends that his most telling question has to do with the structure at the base of society: the family. The question: Do you believe the father of the family must be master in his own house? Since 1992, 42 per cent of Americans polled replied yes. That rose to 52 per cent in 2004.

By contrast, only 25 per cent of Canadians said yes in 1992, sinking to 21 per cent in 2004. By 2012, however, the gap had closed. The American number dropped to 41 while the Canadian rose to 24. Adams said this is probably due to changing demographics and the influx of Muslims.

Quebec, however, offers a slightly different value system than elsewhere in Canada. While it is often ahead of the curve in social programs, it lags the rest of Canada when it comes to acceptance of minorities.

He called Quebec’s francophone majority “insecure.”

“Insecure majorities are trouble because they don’t know who they are,” he said.

He said Quebec francophones have yet to accept North America’s defining characteristic of multiculturalism, which is why they obsess about accommodating foreigners and tend to copy European countries.

The reason that’s not a problem in Toronto, he said, is because it is secure in its multicultural mosaic.